CATCHING DUST - Mark Reviews Movies

Catching Dust, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2024

Writer/director Stuart Gatt begins Catching Dust with a brief, mysterious flash-forward, as someone enters a mobile home in the middle of the desert and in the darkness of dusk. There's a woman's scream, followed immediately by a loud gunshot.

When did this kind of opening become a norm? It so often feels like an easy way for a filmmaker to grab an audience, but what's the cost for a relatively low-key drama such as the one Gatt has constructed here? From the start, we know where this story will lead, so some degree of suspense and most of the feeling of discovery are instantly undermined.

Suddenly, the dramatic questions aren't who these characters are and how those characteristics will collide with the others. Instead, they're more practical queries about what's going to specifically happen. Who has the gun? Who does the screaming, and who gets shot?

In a way, we understand Gatt's choice once the story properly starts, if only because these characters are mysteries, whose motives and behavior are very gradually revealed as the plot unfolds. We think we have a grip, for example, on the couple at the center of the story, who live in a trailer on the land of an old and abandoned commune in the middle of nowhere—more specifically, somewhere in West Texas. Geena (Erin Moriarty) stays in the trailer for the most part, drawing sketches and waiting for her husband to return from hunting, gardening, and doing who-knows-what-else that takes him away from their little home for hours of the day.

Meanwhile, Clyde (Jai Courtney), the husband, is quickly established as a controlling man, who insists Geena stay in or near the trailer and refuses to let her join him on his sporadic trips into a nearby town. He can get angry, too, whenever his wife even gently nudges the thought that she come along on a trip or the reminder that Clyde promised they'd return to civilization at some point in the future. When he finds Geena's sketches, Clyde throws them in the garbage, and she assumes it's because he doesn't even want her to have this little escape from the obvious misery in which she's living.

Appearances can be deceiving, apparently, or at least that's sort of the idea Gatt is going for with this story. It becomes a strangely inconsistent one, though, because the mystery—not only of who kills whom by the end, but also of what the soon-to-be cast of four players want and are hiding from each other—is the primary goal here. Each of them behaves, not in the way he or she would as people with set attitudes and desires, but as malleable pawns the filmmaker's game of keeping us on our toes. It's tiring, especially without any firm ground on which to stand in understanding these characters.

The other two main characters are another married couple, Andy (Ryan Corr) and Amaya (Dina Shihabi). They have come to this remote place from New York City on a vacation to get away from, well, something. Theoretically, it's fine that we don't from the start, but then again, we're also not certain why Geena and Clyde have left their home for this place. There are hints of Clyde doing something bad and owing money to someone, but if Geena can't trust what this man says and does, why should we trust vague suggestions of what actually happened?

All of the characters talk around their past actions or pains and their current wants or needs, such as how desperate Amaya is to plant flowers she brought from the city in the communal garden, which Clyde claims entirely as his own. Geena hints that her husband might be more than only controlling, and while Clyde shows a capacity for violence over and over again, he'll suddenly surprise everyone with some quiet, sincere moment of introspection or caring for others.

Obviously, people can be inconsistent, and characters should be allowed to be so, as well. There's a difference, though, between a movie that cares about such characters, while examining their complexities, and ones like this, which either can't make up its mind about its characters or uses those inconsistencies to tease us about the truth of what's going on its tale.

As Clyde's mercurial personality shifts again and again, it stops mattering if Gatt doesn't know who this guy is or is toying with our expectations by making him so flexible. The end result is the same, as the characters of Catching Dust keep on changing and/or hiding things, while we're left in the dark until the movie decides to let us in on what's happening. It's anticlimactic, not only because we broadly know what's going to happen, but also because even the conclusion doesn't tell us much.

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